The wind outside had stopped.
The silence wasn't peace.
It was warning.
Isadora stood before the locked iron gate. Its design was a tangle of roses, except the roses had fangs instead of thorns, and the metal hissed when touched.
The key was warm in her palm.
Lucien had dropped it while dressing, unaware.
She had seen him, bare to the waist, the scar on his back shaped like a handprint made of fire.
And she had wondered — was it hers?
But now, standing before the gate known as the Garden of Teeth, she knew she couldn't afford to wonder anymore.
She turned the key.
The lock didn't click.
It screamed.
---
The garden inside was not dead — it was decayed alive.
Roses blackened with rot pulsed like hearts. Vines twitched when brushed, curling toward warmth. The soil smelled like blood, and the trees had bark that looked disturbingly like skin.
And in the center stood the crypt-stone altar Lucien always forbade her to approach.
Carved with his family crest.
Drenched in dry blood.
And surrounded by teeth.
Human ones.
They poked out from the ground like flowers.
> This was not a garden.
> It was a graveyard that still remembered hunger.
Isadora stepped forward.
She wasn't afraid.
Not anymore.
She had begun to understand something she shouldn't — that the pain in her chest wasn't fear. It was familiarity.
She'd been here before.
---
As she knelt at the altar, she saw the outline of a box, buried beneath writhing vines. She tore them back with bloodied fingers, ignoring their whispered curses, until her hands struck wood.
A small coffin.
Just large enough for a child.
Her hands trembled.
Inside was a mirror. Old. Cracked. Stained with what might once have been a face.
She saw herself.
But not as she was.
> As she had been.
In a dress made of shadows. A crown of antlers. Eyes black with power. And at her feet—Lucien, kneeling, begging.
Sobbing.
Bleeding.
> "Please don't make me do it."
> "Then don't," she had said. Her voice wasn't hers. It was older. Colder.
> "You love me."
> "I do."
> "Then prove it. Kill the child."
---
The mirror cracked further.
And from the garden soil behind her, hands began to reach up.
Thin, white, child-sized fingers with claws of root and bone.
They dragged themselves up by their teeth.
Mouths open wide.
And the first one smiled at her with a jaw full of iron nails.
"Mother," it said. "We've missed you."
---
She screamed.
But not in fear.
In memory.
Because she had birthed them — not from her womb, but from her magic. From rage. From love broken in half. From betrayal.
The Garden of Teeth was not a prison.
It was a nursery.
And now… they were awake.
---
From the trees above, black crows cawed in a circle. Blood rained in drops.
And somewhere in the distance, the Devil laughed.
End of Chapter Nine.